


Clear Skies

by dubstepgun



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: AU, Crack Pairing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-18
Updated: 2012-07-28
Packaged: 2017-11-10 05:40:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 19,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/462815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dubstepgun/pseuds/dubstepgun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Desmond has grown up in a world without violence,  conflict, or opposition to the Templars' open and absolute control. But there are people who can resist, and Templars who like a challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From a kink meme prompt about the Templars winning and putting that mind control satellite in the sky. It got me thinking about what that kind of world would be like, and this happened. It turned out sort of quiet and contemplative, long, and with more plot and worldbuilding than porn. There's some violence in a few fairly brief descriptions of events from the games.

It was in a high school civics class that Desmond first noticed something was off. 

They were watching one of those announcements from Washington DC, state of the whatever. They were supposed to be. Desmond was looking out the window at some birds. He wasn't missing much. These things were always the same. Every once in a while he looked over and it was still the same group of old people arranged on the stage on the lawn of that old tourist trap. There was the one mad scientist-looking guy talking into a podium, with the big bald guy in the black suit with the earpiece behind them, all wearing those white pins with the square red cross. Nobody else was listening to the guy go on about the economy or whatever either, all napping or messing with their cellphones under the desk where the light wouldn't show. Except for Jo Wyers. She was actually paying attention. She was leaning forward, smoothing her hair behind her ear over and over, eyebrows draw together and mouth pressed thin. Maybe it actually was something important. Jo was smart, not just in the way of getting good grades, but in the way of picking up on things nobody expected but it seemed like you should have, once she pointed it out. 

She'd still had that line between her eyebrows when the lights came up. There was the usual "Any questions?" from the teacher as everybody came out of their daze. 

Jo raised her hand, but when she was called on, it took a minute for her to respond, like she was distracted. Except for the birds outside the window, it was quiet now. 

"Why is it they..." Her thumb pressed her hair back behind her ear. Over and over. "It doesn't make sense. It would work better if they..."

She shook her head hard, like trying to get rid of a buzzing insect. 

All the lines on her face smoothed away when she said, "Never mind." 

It was one of those things no one else would remember. 

Something about it bothered Desmond. It was like the high tightness in the air when someone turns on a TV too far away to hear. 

It was the sort of thing that felt wrong in a way he couldn't name. It fed the restlessness inside him, like when he heard the kids talking in the library about graffiti. 

They were talking in hushed, excited voices at the next table while Desmond was trying to study for a history test. His eyes kept sliding off the page. He didn't have a head for all the wars and massacres and treaties, all with dates to memorize and all as relevant as fairy tales. The peaceful parts were dull and the bloody parts were too far over the top to take seriously. Eventually he stopped trying to care about things from before he was born and let himself listen. 

The kid was talking about how he'd finally managed to scrawl a tag on the south wall, no matter how many times he forgot where he was and what he was doing, or found himself walking away. How he kept going through that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're doing something you shouldn't. How he had to concentrate just to make himself move, and how by the end he was shaking and covered in sweat. 

Later, Desmond went and saw. It was a jagged little scrawl of black paint. If it was meant to say something, it didn't get through. 

Desmond sat on a bench. He took out his pocketknife and tried carving the first thing he thought of into the wood, a letter A. It took some pressure, but it wasn't hard.

A few days later they were both painted over. 

Desmond graduated. He moved out and got a job bartending through a friend. He lived the way people always had. After his shifts he would walk though the dark, empty streets in the canyons between the sheltering towers, and wonder. 

He would have thought he was alone if it weren't for the stories in the newspapers, now and then.

Insurgent Cell Arrested. 

Deafening music and flashing lights were as good as silence and darkness. He asked questions. Many times he got incomprehension or a baffled smile, but he was persistent.

"-sky with diamonds," the girl shouted over the music, before she was folded back into the crowd. 

A few days later there was a woman at the bar, pretty in an intent way, blonde under the always moving lights. 

"I know what you've been looking for," she said, and gave her name as Lucy.


	2. Chapter 2

Desmond's head was still jangling with the noise of the bar as he followed her into the night, so quiet it felt as though his senses had gone dead. The last dregs fanned out past them, calling cabs or stumbling somewhere to sleep it off. The women in high heels and men in disheveled shirts paid more attention to staying on their feet than to the bartender and the girl taking him home. There were a few hours until they'd find themselves on the other side of dawn. The damp fever that was summer in New York was laying low, curled at the base of the streetlights and breathing sleeping sighs into the dark windows. 

"Where-" Desmond began.

She cut him off with a gesture, eyes scanning the street. "Not here." 

It was a few steps later than he identified the note in her voice as fear.

She lead him to steps that went down below the street, and spoke foreign words to the speaker's challenge. There was a buzz, and a click as the door opened. 

There were others like him. 

"What do you think you're doing bringing a stranger here?" a redheaded man with a British accent hissed. 

"He's one of us," Lucy said. She locked the door. 

"How do you know that?" 

"If he wasn't, he couldn't be here." 

The bare rafters of the abandoned warehouse cross-hatched above them. The few Coleman lanterns made the shadows sharp. They gathered. The walls were high and cavernous around the few of them. Most of the space was taken by the mountains of crates, boxes, and iron bars that loomed above them. 

"One of who?" asked Desmond. The air had a tension of a hidden place. 

"The last human beings," said a man who dropped down from the top of a crate with practiced grace. He must have been near Desmond's age, though the hunted cast to his eyes made him look older. Clay, who would show him how to climb and pull himself up where people never looked, how to accept the shock of gravity and fall unharmed. Who would show him the truths that fit together beneath the bedrock of the world. 

"Don't be so dramatic," said a girl with dark hair and a clever face, but she didn't disagree. Becca, who showed him how to dive into the glow of a computer screen and coax out its secrets. 

"What if you were followed?" Shaun, who told him that the world wasn't supposed to be this way, and made him realize that he'd always known. 

"I made sure we weren't." Lucy, who taught him how to fight. 

Desmond said, looking from one face to another, "What do you mean, human?"

That night that sat in a circle, pale by the light of the blue-white lantern, and told him that the locked-away part of him that screamed was right.

"This isn't how things are supposed to be," Lucy said, voice held low to keep from echoing off the metal walls. 

"The Templars own everything," said Shaun.

"Their memos call it 'when the world turned sane,'" Becca put in. She perched on the edge of a crate, swinging her heels. 

"They're in control," said Lucy.

"You mean the government?" Desmond said, baffled. "Sure they are. Ever since things changed." 

"Things do not just _change_ , Desmond," said Shaun. "Not like this."

"We still don't know exactly what they did that day," said Lucy. "Only that it...changed people, somehow. They set limits." 

"Except whatever it is," said Becca, "it's the exact same thing fed into every person on earth. Same dose for everybody, no exceptions."

"Now here's the funny part." Clay gestured in quick, feral motions, "For most people, it's down to the bone. For you, it's only skin deep." 

"It's the same way some people don't get poison ivy," said Becca. 

"Ever wonder why you felt like you were different, Desmond?" said Clay. "It's because you are." 

They told him they could resist. They told him they fought. 

In that summer, Desmond's life divided. The life of before became a backdrop for the small hours that were free. 

There was a night world underneath the surface of the day. It was tiny and desperate. It was what was missing. 

"How many of us are there?" Desmond asked Clay when they were at the highest point of the warehouse's obstacle course, lying on their backs to catch their breath. Through the small high windows the sky was orange with dawn. 

"More than you think." 

Clay won each race to the top by a smaller margin each day. 

"Our strength is in mobility," said Lucy as she showed him how to break a grappling hold. "We have to be able to move fast and stay out of sight."

"Power backfires," Shaun told him. "King Louis XVI was recognized and caught fleeing France because his picture was on the money." 

"So you think we have a chance?" 

"I didn't say that." 

Desmond grew stronger. The summer turned. Sometimes everyone was there at the safehouse, sometimes fewer. Clay was always there. Sometimes training, sometimes reading and making complex notes, something talking quietly to Lucy for a long time. Desmond had never seen him sleep. 

They showed him the threads that ran through history until they pulled together and wrapped the world in a net. There was an encyclopedia riddled with diagrams and perfectly measured holes. 

"In the machine we are all replaceable parts," said Clay. His fingers moved at his sides like spiders. He ignored Shaun when he suggested slowing down. 

Desmond learned, and he believed. 

When they gathered on top of the building, the leaves that rustled beneath the streetlights were yellow and bronze, and the wind had the hint of teeth. 

"They called the greatest grandmaster The Eagle," said Lucy. "He said that before you could be one of us, you had to fly."

"I'm jumping off a building because a guy a thousand years ago liked birds?" said Desmond. 

"It's symbolism," Clay said, staring up at the moon. "Freedom." 

"C'mon," said Becca, "You've done it plenty of times before." 

"Inside, onto pads, not into bushes in a park I can barely see." 

"You can see," said Clay.

"What's the worst that could happen?" said Shaun. "I mean, besides the cracked skull and broken bones, that sort of thing." 

"Thanks. That helps a lot." 

When Desmond stepped up to the edge they fell silent. The wind invited him.

He flew. 

The hidden city was his, the balconies and the rooftops. They did things that should have been impossible. They stole secrets, and hid while footsteps passed, and were alive.

The news never mentioned them.

"We're almost there," Becca said, bathed in the glow of the screen. "It's all leading to something. If we can find out what it is they did..."

"It's always them," Clay broke in. He was staring at a sheet of code. His voice was out of key. "How do you hide from the light you see yourself by?" 

Lucy put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged her off, whirled, and grabbed Desmond. 

"Tell me I can trust you." His eyes were rimmed with white. "Can they lie for this?" 

"It's okay," Desmond said. "Come on. It's okay." 

When he said it, he believed it. He didn't think anyone was even looking for them. What could rouse the complacent world? 

It was not long after that.

"Shouldn't you be getting home?" Lucy said. Outside the light was changing from the pink pink of dawn to full day. 

"Soon as I get this done," Desmond said, giving a crate from the obstacle course a shove into a new position. "I'm trying to make things a little more interesting." 

"Keep it possible," Clay said. He was doing better that day. Desmond would always remember that. 

"Possible's boring." He heard steps coming down the stairs outside, that would be Becca and Shaun coming back. Clay went to the intercom to let them in.

The buzz didn't come. 

One thump, then the door shattered. 

Men in uniform poured in. Their faces were black visors. 

They swarmed over Clay. He kicked and elbowed in their gasp, then they did something to him, and he cried out and fell limp. 

Terror blanked Desmond's mind. He heard himself shouting Lucy's name, sprinting for her and grabbing her by the arm, and they ran the back way out that he'd never thought they would have to use. The uniformed men were fast. He could hear him close behind, boots tramping on the cement. 

The handle was in his grasp. He yanked the door open. 

Desmond nearly ran right into the huge bald man in the black suit. The one he'd seen a hundred times, standing in the back at the government announcements. 

Something sharp stung him.


	3. Chapter 3

Desmond felt motion. He felt the cold, heavy fear that soaked him before he remembered why. He was laying down in the back seat of a car, moving fast and smoothly, and his hands were tied behind him with something plastic. He opened his eyes. 

" _Shit_!" His body leaped and twisted, banging his head against the window as he pressed back to get as far as he could from the huge bald man with the red and white pin. 

"Calm down," the bald man said. "No one is going to hurt you." 

Desmond had never heard his voice before. It was deep and calm, with a faint French accent, and sounded used to giving commands. 

"Lucy. Clay." His own voice was thin and frightened. "What did you do to them?" 

He remembered Lucy's face gone white, and Clay vanishing behind a wall of uniforms and masks. Shaun and Becca could still be free. The Templars might not even know they existed. 

"Your friends are safe." 

_Liar._

Desmond's head was full of the surreal thought of being murdered, like in a movie. Corpses buried quietly in the night. They were the ones who made the rules. Who knew what they were capable of that the rest of the world wasn't? 

Desmond's pulse beat against his throat. "Where are they?" 

The windows were dark. There was a partition separating them from the driver. The world outside was vague, shifting casts of gray. 

"With other Templars who have taken on your case. They each have someone who will watch over them." Desmond could not read anything recognizable in his eyes. "You're mine." 

Behind his back, Desmond's hands scrabbled desperately at the car door, seeking the handle. There was nothing but smooth upholstery. The bald man looked at him with something like interest. 

"Always so unreasonable. You'd smash your head open on the road, trying to run."

He looked perfectly composed, hands resting on his knees. Maybe people who weren't supposed to exist died every day. One look at his hands made the idea of strangulation no longer seem like cartoon absurdity. 

"Where are you taking me?" Though the window was cool against the back of his head, sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

He thought of the ruins on Rikers Island, the pictures of rusted bars and the people who said you could still hear prisoners clawing at the walls.

"To show you the truth." 

"Brainwashing," Desmond threw back.

"No." Implacable. "It wouldn't work on you." 

"That's what this is about." For an instant, a wave of anger rolled over the sick fear. "You'll kill us or lock us up because we're different and you can't control us. You can't stand that there's anybody alive who's still free. We're not you so we're evil and it's okay to destroy us."

The bald man's expression never changed. He only shook his head, as though he weren't surprised at all.

He only said, "Wrong is not the same as evil." 

Desmond's back dragged down the car door. There was no escape that way. There was no telling where he was, and no way to follow. These people, as Shaun and Clay had told him, tracing between the lines of history, were experts at making things disappear. 

The bald man never looked away from him. "You're right. You are different. Where the rest of humanity were put on a better path unwillingly, you have a choice. We're going to help you make the right one, Desmond." 

What turned his blood cold was that everything they did to him would be for his own good. 

"Who the hell are you?" 

"Robert de Sable." 

Pronounced the French way. Ro-bear. Desmond's thoughts ran in inane circles, and that was better than thinking about what might be happening to Lucy and Clay, and what was going to happen to him. He'd seen that name somewhere, in the paper or the news maybe, with other people high in the government who had nothing to do with Desmond. 

The car was going slower, turning more often. It came to a stop. Robert put a black bag over Desmond's head.

"A formality," he said. "Don't try to run." 

As soon as Desmond heard the door open and felt outside air, he ran.

Blind and off-balance, he threw himself forward as fast as his body would move, unable to know if he was sprinting toward a dead end, caring only that it was away from the fast hard footsteps behind him. 

He hit something hard with his right shoulder, stumbled, kept going. It was too slow, too slow. No one alive could catch him when he had his hands and eyes. His panting sucked in the black fabric.

Something heavy hit his back, and the ground vanished from under his feet. His legs kicked at empty air until he hit grass with a body on top of him that knocked the breath from his lungs.

If there was anyone there, they said nothing, if they were even able to see something that was not supposed to happen. 

"I nearly forgot that you can disobey," Robert said as he got up and pulled Desmond to his feet like a ragdoll. Because he was out of breath from the chase, it sounded like he was laughing.


	4. Chapter 4

The building was full of the cool breath of air conditioning and the clack of shoes on tile. Robert's hand was wrapped around Desmond's upper arm. He thought he heard other people, but couldn't be certain. In any way that mattered, he was alone. 

There was nowhere to go but where Robert guided. They stopped. He head an electronic beep and felt the floor move upward. It seemed to take a long time, for all he had to judge by.

He thought of a book he'd had to read in high school, about what people before thought the future would be like. He thought of Room 101, and cages of rats. 

Lucy had always been faster than him. If anyone could get escape, it would be her.

When it stopped, he was lead forward. To the right, seven steps, right again, sixteen, left, twenty-four. The walls felt close. It was quiet, the carpet swallowing their footsteps. A door opened and Desmond was led in. It closed behind them. There was a sound of locks sliding in place.

Robert pulled the bag off his head. For an instant, the light left him as blind as before. An entire wall was glass, looking out to the street far below. The place itself was an apartment twice the size of his own.

 _I'm in a prison nobody I know could afford,_ he thought dizzily. 

"The hell is this?" he said out loud. 

"There's no point to having cells that would almost always be empty. It's more efficient to repurpose a room. That doesn't mean there is any less security. You won't be escaping." 

Robert cut the tie around Desmond's wrists. He had never understood the blessing of having free movement and full balance. He turned to keep Robert in his sight, staving off the crawling sensation of having an enemy at his back. 

"How long are you gonna keep me here?" he demanded, backing away slowly until a chair struck his leg. 

Robert did not follow. He stood and watched, like a pillar holding up the entire gleaming trap. 

"Until you see reason." 

"And if I don't?" 

"You'll spend your life in our custody." 

"Turn traitor or be locked up forever." Desmond's hand closed around the back of the chair. "Not much of a choice." 

"Desmond." Robert's voice turned to the tone of personal, important communication, as though coaxing someone down from a high ledge. "This is not what you think. You're no threat to us, but your efforts pose a danger to others and to yourself. You're part of a terrorist organization. You can't be allowed to go free."

"We aren't terrorists," Desmond said, angry enough for an instant to forget fear. 

"You fight to bring back the fear and suffering of the old world," Robert returned swiftly, with conviction that was the closest thing to anger Desmond had seen him display. "What other name could fit?" 

Desmond stared at him and tried to find an answer. 

Robert's head cocked to the side as if listening. The earpiece was so expected that Desmond didn't see it until Robert touched a hand to where it was perched and answered someone, told them he would be there immediately. 

_Clay's made a run for it,_ Desmond thought wildly. _Lucy's free._

Robert cut the connection and looked at Desmond. "Rest and wait. I'll come back." 

There was a keypad by the door, but he used something from his pocket instead. The door clicked open. Desmond hit him with the chair. 

The impact jolted into his shoulders and Robert's shout of surprise clashed with the snap of a wooden leg snapping loose. Desmond dropped his weapon, dodged around Robert, and bolted. 

Halls flashed by that were like any other apartment building except that the doors had no numbers and heavy keypads sealing them shut. Twenty-four and right. 

He had begun to count the next when Robert caught him. For the second time in less than an hour, Desmond hit the ground. A heavy knee was placed firmly in the small of his back. His fingers clawed uselessly in the carpet. 

"You," Robert said as he marched him back, "might be interesting." 

The door closed behind him. The handle might as well have been carved from stone for how much Desmond's efforts moved it. He punched numbers at random on the keypad until it beeped remonstration. Sour adrenaline and dread curled in a mass of confusion in his stomach. Desmond collapsed into the chair that was still unbroken. He was too tired to care.


	5. Chapter 5

By now, Becca and Shaun would know something had happened. It was important that Desmond believed they were still free. They knew how and when to run. They'd've taken one look at the empty warehouse and know, and gone to find help from other corners of the underworld. There were more. Becca had told him as much, before saying, with a hint of apology, that they couldn't let any names or details be known to an untested new member.

In case of capture. 

It was like red warning letters painted on a glass box with nothing inside. What could they do? He was beginning to understand how small they were, how undermanned and unprepared. The Templars were the people who kept nations in motion. The insurgent cell was a few oddities who could jump from high places and do acrobatics. 

Time existed at an adjacent space. At some point, a man in the ubiquitous nondescript uniform of minor government employees opened the door, bearing food and a change of clothes for Desmond in his left hand. Desmond was poised to attack until the man made an admonishing gesture with the tazer in his right. 

"Been warned about you," he muttered. 

He left. Desmond ate. He watched the sky over the city become stained with orange. He wondered if he had been wrong entirely about what they wanted, and if he would instead be left alone and forgotten here, a relic of an old style of humanity that was no longer relevant. At some point, he must have slept. 

Robert was as good as his word. 

When he came in the next day, Desmond was leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the window. Cars the size of toys moved silently on the street below. To one side other buildings stood in close, but to the other there was open sky and city, with a distant glint of the bay. He remembered hauling himself up fire escapes, the crunch of gravel under his feet, slamming his elbow into a security guard's face and fleeing with nothing left to stop him.

_"You're not trying," Lucy said as she dropped her hands._

_"Sure I am."_

_"Try again." She gestured toward herself. "Come on."_

_He did. Within fifteen seconds he was facedown on the mat spread out in the center of the warehouse. Lucy extended a hand and helped him up._

_"You can't just go through the motions. You have to really try to hit me."_

_Desmond tried to imagine his fist smashing into her serious, pretty face. He looked down. "I can't do it."_

_"You can. For us, the only block is mental."_

_"What does that mean?"_

_Shaun answered from by the table they'd pushed off to the side, where he was drinking tea and pretending to read something while he watched them. "It means you've got no excuse for being a pansy."_

_"Yeah, thanks. That helps a lot."_

_"We're conditioned from birth never to hurt anyone," said Lucy, ignoring the interruption. "But sometimes it's necessary, and you need to know how."_

_Desmond shook his head. "I don't know. It doesn't feel right to try to hit a woman."_

_Shaun's eyes rolled. "I'm sure your chivalry is appreciated by the woman who's been effortlessly kicking your arse for the past half hour."_

_"I have an idea." Lucy's face brightened. "Try hitting Shaun."_

_"Me? Why not Clay? He's a man!"_

_"What are you so worried about?" said Clay, who was sprawled over a crate and usually listening when you thought he wasn't. "He's just a pansy."_

_After the show of reluctance, Shaun got invested into the effort, coming out with strings of increasingly colorful invective. It was a particularly creative one about his parentage that finally inspired Desmond to swing for his face with full commitment._

_Clay crowed, and Lucy gave a nod of approval. Shaun levered himself up from the mat and gingerly touched his jaw._

_"Not bad," he admitted. "For a novice."_

_Then they really got started._

"Beautiful, isn't it?" said Robert from behind him.

Desmond didn't turn around. He knew what he'd see. The same black suit, tie, earpiece, fucking red and white fucking pin. His breath fogged the glass, cleared, and fogged it again.

"Before the revolution, every year five hundred people were murdered here. That was less than many places. They bled their lives out, alone, on those streets. Now, if you see a woman walking through Brooklyn in the middle of the night and ask her if she is afraid, she will say, 'Of what?'"

"Because there's nobody left," said Desmond. A traffic light turned red at the corner below. "They're as safe as anybody who's kept locked up. They're all prisoners, and you don't even have the decency to let them know it." 

"Would they be happier to know?" 

"You can't just make that decision for everyone!" Desmond's fist pounded on the glass with a hollow sound. "What gives you the right?" 

"Desmond." Robert waited until Desmond looked at him. "When you were captured, what did you think would happen to you here?" 

Desmond's neck stiffened and he turned his head to stare at the sky. "I don't know." 

"You're lying." 

His voice had neither anger or surprise, as though they spoke a script, and Desmond was following his part to the letter. He felt a sudden, heady rush of hatred for this cold, clockwork enforcer. 

Robert went on, "You expected to be tortured for information on your co-conspirators, then either killed out of hand or tortured further until your mind broke. Am I wrong?" 

Desmond said nothing. 

"That isn't going to happen. Because-" 

"Because you're the good guys," Desmond cut in venomously.

"Because it doesn't work." The bluntness was as unbalancing as a rug pulled from beneath his feet. "A man under torture will say anything to stop the pain, and that is only useful in the rare case that you can immediately verify the information. It also becomes out of date very quickly. For example, your friends will have moved or changed anything you know about as soon as they learned you were compromised." 

That could have meant a lot of things. Desmond's mind latched to one and would not let go.

Shaun and Becca were still free. The Templars were not omniscient, and they were not invincible. 

Desmond forced his face to show nothing as he watched the cars threading through the distant streets and vanishing around promontories of glass and steel. 

"Thirty years ago," Robert said, "you would have been right. Though it was proved ineffective again and again, people clung to the myth, because it was an illusion that they loved. Human history is a catalogue of the failures of brutality. But they never stopped trying. There is a part of us too deep for reason to reach that loves force for its own sake. There could never be peace until it was quieted." 

"You didn't like what people were doing, so you gave the whole species a lobotomy." 

Desmond thought he caught a mote of frustration tightening the corner of Robert's eye. It gave him a bite of satisfaction to make a mark on the man's implacability. 

"What do you imagine the world was like before, Desmond?" 

"Better," he answered recklessly. "Free." 

"In that world, if you were caught by the totalitarian regime you imagine us to be, right now your friend would be having his fingernails torn out one by one." 

Desmond punched him in the stomach. 

It was like hitting a pile of bricks. Robert was a walking wall of muscle. He barely looked surprised. Desmond swung for his face, was blocked, and kept attacking, driving him away from the window.

"Fight back!" he shouted, burning all the dread and confusion of the past day in a burst. "Do something!" 

"Calm down," said Robert, blocking each blow and stepping back in measured paces. "There's no point to this." 

"You're just one of them, aren't you?" Desmond tried to shatter his kneecap with a stomping kick and was deflected. "You could have a choice, but you gave it up cause it's easier to be a fucking puppet!" 

He barely saw Robert's fist before it smashed into his jaw. The floor leapt out from beneath him, then rose up to strike him in the back. Desmond lay there for a minute, staring dizzily up at the ceiling. There was only the sound of his rough breathing and Robert's slow footsteps. The man in the black suit knelt by him.

"Woah," said Desmond, floating somewhere, impressed. "Damn." 

"You're going to need to see it for yourself, aren't you. The old world." 

"Yeah," said Desmond.

Robert grasped his hand. His was warm and dry.

"Then you'll see."


	6. Chapter 6

When the blindfold was removed from Desmond's eyes, he blinked to resolve the blue-white haze into a small laboratory. He rolled his wrists when they were freed from the cuffs. 

"Do you have to do all that just to move me around the building?" Though he'd counted the steps and turns, the silent elevator could have taken him two floors down or twenty.

Robert's gaze dropped significantly to Desmond's bruised jaw. "Yes." 

There were two technicians with white coats and clipboards going along their tasks with the docility of normal people. They were busy with what looked like a steel table with a slash of semi-transparent inlay running down the center, with a set of small stepstone circles and a curvature that suggested a spine. The inlay glowed gently in the aquamarine of a pristine artificial lake. There was a monitor attached, where one of the technicians was summoning dense blocks of text and numbers. 

"This is the machine?" said Desmond. It looked too thin and too near to ordinary to contain all the old world. 

"The Animus." 

"What is it supposed to show me, exactly?" 

"It varies from person to person. What you experience depends on your ancestor. The Animus can decode your DNA and recreate your ancestor's life down to the last detail. Once you are in, it will let you experience the world as it used to be."

The room smelled sterile and sharp with disinfectant. The table had a thick metal arm restraint with a delicate tube snaking from inside. One technician was cleaning the needle at the end.

Desmond found himself inching away. "That's impossible."

Robert asked the other technician something, nodded at the response. He looked at Desmond.

"Turn back now if I've ever lied to you." 

When Desmond climbed up onto the machine, he was surprised to find the surface warm. The metal had a slight thrum through his thin shirt, as though an engine were turning somewhere inside it. The curve curled close against his back. A transparent screen rose over his field of view, encircling his head, and he relaxed as he understood that this was all a mechanism to play the memories there like a movie. 

One of the techs swabbed his arm with alcohol and pushed the needle in. 

Robert leaned over him and said, "It's easiest if you accept it as it comes. Don't fight." 

The world went away. 

Without moving, he was on his feet. There were no walls or ceiling. Nothing but white in every direction. Lines cut the air into cubes and shifted through him.

"The hell is this?" Desmond shouted into the endless space above him. "Robert!" 

_They've killed me,_ he thought wildly. _All of this was just to kill me._

"I'm here," said Robert's voice from above and nowhere. "It's all right. It's only loading." 

"Finding an entry point," another voice reported. 

Loading what? Desmond was about to ask, when Italy leapt to life in front of him. 

The first thing he saw was the man he hated. He had betrayed his father and condemned him and his brothers to death though he had held the proof of their innocence in his own hands. The gauntlet was heavy and foreign on Ezio's arm. A thousand times he'd practiced the motion of flicking the blade in and out. Now was the time to bury it in the traitor's heart. Heat rose from the roof tiles, caught in the folds of his cloak. The guards only watched the ground. Uberto wandered far afield of them, the arrogant fool. Ezio clung to jutting bricks and windowsills and dropped silently down. It could have been done in an instant, but Ezio wanted him to see his death coming. He called his name. 

The terror in the fat man's eyes was pure beauty. 

He could not even turn to run before Ezio leapt onto the bastard and plunged his blade into his chest. The metal sang through flesh with the sound of tearing cloth and a wet steel resonance. Each time there was a jar through Ezio's arm as the blade ripped through the breastbone. He stabbed again and again, until the light was gone from his beady pig's eyes and his last pleading gasps were strangled off with a thick gurgle. 

It was justice, and it wasn't enough. 

A thousand times would be a beginning. 

His hands were hot and wet but on his arm the clever gauntlet did not slip. Blood soaked the bastard's rich clothes and blood soaked Ezio, and the smell was thick as iron in his mouth. There were screams, and there were shouts for guards, and the corpse could give him nothing more so Ezio sprang to his feet and ran, fleet with grief and rage and elation even as someone else twisted and fought, and under his feet the world broke into pieces and turned empty and white. 

Roaring: " _-were you_ thinking _throwing him straight into that?_ "

Querulous, cowed: " _Sir, you said to access any early memory-_ "

" _Do I need to always specify that a thing shouldn't include murder? Get him-_ "

The real world was there. Desmond was on his back on the Animus. The arching blank screen cut over his vision. He struggled to make his own limbs move as he wanted, and thrashed against the cuff on his arm. 

Robert was saying, "Desmond, calm down, it wasn't you," and he did something that made the cuff open so he could pull out the needle. Desmond slid out from under the screen, sat up, and vomited on the floor. 

"Idiots," Robert growled as he grabbed Desmond by the arm. "Give me one person who can think." 

Desmond was cuffed and blindfolded again, though it was all he could do to stay upright without them. He leaned heavily on Robert and behind the black fabric saw Uberto Alberti's burgundy robes dyed darker. Bound in front of Desmond, a murder's fingers opened and closed.


	7. Chapter 7

After the short time away, Desmond's prison felt like coming back to safety. He had washed the burn of bile from his throat but couldn't get rid of the smell of blood. He was motionless on the couch, pale and trembling. The force of it would not leave him. Time must have been passing, somewhere. 

In movies and video games it was so simple. The bad guys died, and that was okay, because it doesn't happen to real people, the kind who kick and thrash and throw their eyes desperately around the courtyard for help that isn't coming. Desmond's stomach roiled. 

He didn't know if Robert was there or not until a glass appeared in front of him and the deep voice with its faint French accent commanded, "Drink." 

It tasted like whiskey and helped a little. 

Robert's footsteps moved toward the door. Desmond croaked, "Wait." 

They stopped. Desmond's eyes didn't move from the tabletop. He touched his fingers together, thinking, _Now I'll feel it, warm and sticky, drying._

"Stay. Just for a while." 

Robert didn't answer, and didn't leave. 

A Templar for company was better than his memory.

_"Assassins? You mean you kill people?"_

_"Yes, Desmond, we kill people," said Shaun, with the exasperation that seemed to be the only way his voice functioned. "That's why you've seen every newscast on the planet shouting about the murderer on the loose, because we run about smashing our cover into tiny little pieces."_

_"Don't be a dick, Shaun," said Becca, and added to Desmond, "It's just a name."_

_They were nestled in a sphere of pale light in the cavernous darkness, sprawled on chairs and training mats in the middle of the dusty warehouse that Desmond had never known he could miss so much._

_Clay said, "We're a watered down version of something a lot older. They used to take out their enemies, but that was a lot easier to get away with back before Templars yanked the thanatos right out of everybody else's system. Now it would be shooting a hole right through the middle of something we both need: the polite fiction that we don't exist."_

_Nothing but their quiet voices, the hum of Becca's laptop, and the singing of the crickets that made their homes in crates and corners. The summer night sounds._

_There were things you went your whole life without talking about, or knowing anybody else thought. To know that there was such thing as other people who chafed and doubted, who weren't quite right, was like coming out of fog into clear air. Desmond had never known how alone he was until he wasn't, anymore._

_"It's a different kind of war these days," said Lucy._

Desmond couldn't say how long it was before talking became a possibility. At some point the glass had become empty. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Robert's massive frame folded into a chair across and to the side of him. 

"I've never hated somebody like that." His voice was sudden to his own ears, out of place in the silence. "Even you guys-" His gesture took in Robert, the building, the world under Templar control- "It was more a game than anything. Something to do that maybe mattered."

He traced lines of condensation on the table.

"I've never wanted anything the way Ezio wanted that guy dead." 

Robert said, "That's-" 

"Don't tell me that's how the world used to be!" Desmond's voice came out in a guttural crack that rasped in his throat. "I don't want to hear about how everything was barbaric and now thanks to Templars it's all sunshine and rainbows. I'm sick of talking to a propaganda poster. Your point is fucking made. I don't want to hear it." 

His words settled in the air as he glared defiantly in Robert's face. 

"I was going to say," Robert said, "that's not what I was expecting you to see." 

"Oh." Desmond rubbed his thumb on the edge of the table. "It's not?" 

"I suspected you had Assassin ancestry, but not that you would be thrown immediately into an assassination. Usually the first accessible memories are...quieter, routine moments. You must have an affinity for the machine." 

"Lucky me," Desmond muttered. 

It had all felt so easy, like it was a place where he belonged. It was as though he'd wandered into an oil painting, full of vibrant color and rich detail, and only then realized that for the rest of his life he'd been living in the frame. He looked down at his arm. The hidden blade bracer was missing.

Robert sounded like he was talking about an old friend, not an acquaintance. 

"Hey. Have you been in that thing?" 

Robert inclined his head. "I have." 

Beneath the numbed horror of what he'd been through, curiosity stirred. "What were you?" 

"You won't believe me." 

Desmond's hand made a quick, flapping gesture. "Come on." 

Robert looked at him levelly. "A knight." 

"What?" For a moment Desmond forgot the feeling of blood drying between his fingers. "I had to murder a scared fat guy, and you got to ride around in shining armor on a horse saving princesses?" 

"If by that you mean being the strongarm for a petty lord." A distance came over his face. "It wasn't so much different." 

"Oh." 

Desmond wondered how many people there were alive who'd felt someone die by their hands. Two in one place had to be rarer than a family of white tigers. 

Quietly, Robert confided, "I liked the horse." 

Nothing that day startled Desmond more than hearing himself laugh. 

Robert told him he wouldn't have to go into the Animus again. Desmond was surprised that his relief wasn't pure. 

He thought he would dream of the knife and the dying man's face. What he dreamed of was the sun beating on his back, the bricks under his fingers. His thoughts nothing but purpose, and the moment of letting go, knowing his feet would find him.

The next day, Desmond knew he had to go back.


	8. Chapter 8

"Are you certain?" said Robert. His eyebrows were twin arches. 

"Seeing the old world is what I'm here for, isn't it?" _That and keeping me locked up._ Desmond paced over carpet that swallowed his footsteps. On the other side of the impregnable glass, the sky blazed with cloudless morning clarity. "I need to see more." 

Until he did he would only have the dead man in a blank field. 

"That man," Robert said, voice low, "won't be the last." 

"I know." Desmond took a deep breath and scrubbed his hand through his hair. "Just do it before I lose my nerve." 

It was only when he was getting on the Animus that he realized he had, unthinkably, given a Templar a command.

The quiet and nervous tech affixed the cuff around Desmond's arm and slipped the machine's drug into his veins. 

That day, Desmond's life divided. Part of him lived inside the walls of reality, while another ran under the past's blazing sun. 

In the dust of the practice ring, Mario Auditore told him the history of the silent war between Templar and Assassin. In the measured quiet of his prison, Robert told him the other side. 

"Rodrigo Borgia's days were dark times for the Order. It became twisted and corrupt, run by men more interested in power for its own sake than for the peace and stability it could bring. Weak men, dragging history backwards." Robert's eyes narrowed, and his voice, though quiet, held a savagery Desmond had never heard in the real world. "Your ancestor did us a favor." 

Archers he killed with the flick of a throwing knife, a moment of slumping silhouette and a sigh that carried softly through the night. Vieri de Pazzi he killed in hate. He shouted in words he didn't understand and kicked a corpse that held onto its smug secrets. "Do not become him," Mario said, and for an instant Desmond didn't know who he was speaking to. 

He emerged with his hands trembling. Robert took him back to his room and stayed. It became a ritual, as the sky turned orange above the city on the other side of the glass, to be with him, to talk or not talk. Each day he stayed until Desmond had acclimated again to the cold water of reality. 

Every death was different. The killing became easier. Each time Desmond moved in the predetermined momentum of his ancestor, and the voices doubled: in one register, _"Requiescat in pace"_ , in the other, _"It's not me."_

 _The old world,_ Desmond thought as with one hand he grabbed a guard by the tabard and pulled him over the parapet. _The mad world._

"Two hours a day," Robert said after the horizon melted to white, when he protested being pulled out, "no more. The Animus is a powerful tool and a dangerous drug."

Desmond had never felt less anesthetized. 

_The ones with recent dates are so lifeless,_ he thought as he ran his fingers over the spines of the books in his prison. _Did I ever notice that before?_

"Art is a way to cope with suffering," Robert told him when he said as much. "It's become vestigial." 

He didn't talk so much about how the world used to be. 

Leonardo da Vinci made his blade hollow to carry poison. The inventor's eyes shone with fascination as his hands flew over the weapon, shaping, mapping, creating a device to kill with a genius's craft. Neither could exist anymore. What rose to Desmond's thought was Ezio's anger. 

People like him risked and lost their lives in this war, and history never remembered their courage. They were swallowed up in the past, like Desmond, Clay, and Lucy were swallowed up in the Templars' labyrinth. 

"Lucy and Clay," Desmond forced himself to ask, when the sky through the window was orange and he was learning again how to move without the weight of armor and the whisper of a cloak, "Have they joined you?" 

"Clay hasn't," Robert said, and Desmond didn't know what doubts he'd had until he felt the full force of his relief. Robert's voice sounded almost amused. "He is stubborn, like you." 

When he stopped there, Desmond turned sharply away from the window. 

Dread coiled inside him as he said, "What about Lucy?" 

Robert paused, and a look of sorrow passed over his face. 

In that moment of hesitation, Desmond was certain he had been wrong to ever believe him. The Templars were no defanged beasts treating their captive enemies with reasoned persuasion. The room he stood in was as much an illusion as anything in the Animus. Maybe he'd never left it. They'd taken her, the walls of this bottomless place had closed around her, and she was dead. 

Robert said softly, "Lucy has always been one of us."


	9. Chapter 9

"Liar."

Wide-eyed, Desmond backed away from Robert until a chair struck him in the shin. 

And Robert just kept giving him that sad, steady look. 

"How did you think we found you?" 

In the lights that painted her in moving colors, Lucy had told him he wasn't alone. 

"You bastard." Desmond's head swung back and forth without his conscious control. "The minute I start to believe a word you say, you try to turn me against my friends." 

"She made the right choice, Desmond." 

_Shouldn't you be going home?_

"No. I'm not falling for it. Lucy would never betray us." 

_The hint of a shy smile, among them and apart._

Robert stepped forward. "She never did that. She was there to protect you, and to keep you from doing anything drastic." 

"Yeah, that's a lot better." Heat rose in Desmond's chest, stronger and cleaner than doubt, and he glared up into Robert's face. "You're telling me my friend stabbed me in the back, and that it's okay because it's part of what you assholes are always saying about keeping us as slaves for our own good?"

"You have no idea what you're talking about." His voice cut coldly, and Desmond felt a sting of petty satisfaction at making him sound angry like a mere human. "The plan was for her to only observe and contain your group. Do you know why she turned you in?" 

"She didn't," Desmond spat back. 

Robert rested his hand on the back of a chair, and tightened his fingers until it creaked. His head lowered to meet Desmond's eyes, giving him the look of a bull preparing to attack. 

"Your friend was losing his mind," he said, slowly and clearly. "Lucy called us in when she couldn't bear to watch it anymore." 

The room tilted on its axis. Desmond fell back toward the chair and hit the floor instead.

_Lucy tried to calm him, he snapped and drove her back. It was a dance they had._

"Oh god," he said. "Christ. Clay." 

It could be frightening, how he acted, how sometimes he would pause with his finger over a passage in a book and stare at the wall like there was something written on the crumbling brick and whisper indecipherable words. How, when the rest of them treated it as a complex and important game, he worked with feverish devotion, like a man on a cliff braiding his own lifeline. How far away he went. Then he'd wake up, and he'd be laughing about how some of the Templars' secrets were buried under layers of encryption and some were as simple as single substitution cyphers, like kids heating up paper to discover the secret writing made in soapy water or lemon juice, and Becca would be talking about how everything always came back to paper, like how one of the first versions of BASIC was scrawled on paper tape and run on some ancient computer that happened to be named after the same star as the old eagle guy. And Clay would be okay. It was just how he was. Desmond thought he was the only one who wondered if someday he wouldn't come back. 

Robert knelt beside him, shoe sinking into the carpet. His expression was sympathetic, and that was what Desmond didn't know how to take. 

"Resistant people can't help but notice the gap between what they are told and what their senses observe." Over Robert's looming shoulder the wall of sky was darkening. "Some minds can endure it. Others can't. They become paranoid, delusional, unable to trust even themselves. If he had been let worsen for much longer, there would be nothing we could do. In the most likely case, within a few years, he would have taken his own life." 

Desmond thought of the old movies, of men standing on bridges and window ledges, holding on against the wind and looking down and down. 

_Clay's voice thick with bitterness: "They don't even leave people the will to kill themselves."_

Robert's eyes were cool and deep. "He's getting help here, Desmond. Already he's recovering."

_After a round of sparring Lucy grinned as she let him get his breath back and said, "We're gonna save the world."_

She would never betray them. 

To save them, she would do anything she thought she had to. 

Desmond sat up and pressed his hands against his face. The darkness was a relief from the dusk. 

"All I've got is your word," he said, weak and thin to his own ears. "For all I know, they're both dead, and you're keep keeping me alive to jerk around for fun. If you're going to kill me hurry up and do it." 

Robert's voice was solemn. "No one's going to kill you."

"Fuck you." 

Desmond watched the afterimages run and jump in the colored sparks in the darkness. He waited and hated himself for knowing, no matter how he fought to doubt, that Robert was and always had been telling the truth. 

After a long time, Robert said, "Desmond." 

Desmond didn't look up. "Just leave me alone, all right?" 

Softly: "All right." 

There was the sound of footsteps being absorbed into the carpet, and the beep of the door. Opening, closing. Quiet. Real dark descended before Desmond opened his eyes. 

The next day passed through a haze. He saw no one but the man who brought him food. When he thought of his life it was unintelligible to him, nothing but shapes and images that did not resolve into anything he recognized. He thought of Ezio's life instead. What would Ezio have done? _Stabbed Robert in the throat with a fork and broke out._ The thought made his stomach turn. He drifted in front of the window wall and thought of Firenze. 

The next day, Robert was there.

He said, "Come with me." 

Desmond obeyed. 

He thought he was being taken to the Animus, but he felt the elevator moving up instead. He was led out. For the first time in what he guessed to be two weeks, he felt open air. Sun struck his face. A breeze toyed with the ends of the blindfold, and he heard sounds of distant traffic far below. 

The cuffs came off his wrists. He pushed the blindfold up and blinked in the sudden light of the rooftop. 

"Hey," said Clay.


	10. Chapter 10

"Jesus Christ, Clay." Before Desmond knew he was moving, his arms were thrown around his friend. He didn't vanish like a part of him expected. "I thought you were dead."

"They can't kill us, idiot." He hugged him back hard. "Like the old movie. Too rare to die."

Desmond let go and took a look at him. His presence was as real and revitalizing as cold water under a desert sun. He had changed. The manic flash to his eyes was gone, as well as the dark circles beneath them. His smile was easy, and he'd felt less gaunt. People weren't supposed to get better in enemy captivity.

"Are you okay?" Desmond said, needing to ask and feeling his eyes try to move toward Robert where he watched them from a few paces back.

"Believe it or not, yeah." He gestured at the sky around them and the building below. "Not what you expected, huh?"

"Yeah. I thought it was gonna be like those things you used to read about the Spanish Inquisition." It was Shaun, actually, who would read out gruesome descriptions while Becca chorused a gleeful "Gross!" and Lucy patiently asked if there really wasn't anything productive he could be doing, but if the Templars didn't know there were more members of their cell, he wasn't going to hand it to them. "Instead they just keep trying to talk me into joining."

Except that Lucy knew.

A sliver of ice jabbed into Desmond's guts and spread a horrible suspicion. His eyes raced over Clay again, looking for anything he'd missed. Something small, like a red and white pin.

"You didn't...?" Desmond began, and stopped, as though finishing the thought would be a spell to lock it into reality.

"Didn't--?" Clay's eyebrows met in confusion before his expression cleared. "Turn Templar?" He waved his hands in front of him. "No way."

Relief nearly took Desmond's legs out from beneath him like an undertow. One thing in the world, at least, was still as it should be.

Clay laughed at the look on his face. "What, you really thought they'd get me that easy? I'd be insulted, if I didn't know you're judging by how batshit I was before."

His smile faded, and for a moment his face sharpened with a furtive suspicion that was nearly nostalgic.

"You haven't gone over to them." It wasn't quite a question.

"No," said Desmond, who was shocked to see it, from the other side, as possible.

Clay relaxed visibly. "Didn't think so."

It was impossible not to lower his voice, though he knew if there was a possibility of missing a word they said in this place, they would never have been brought there. Desmond said, "Have they done anything to you?"

"Nah. All they've done is talk to me. I figured there'd be brainwashing at least. After seeing them hiding in every shadow so long, it's almost anticlimactic."

He had been right. They had been there, hiding in plain sight and a shy smile. It must have shown on Desmond's face.

"Lucy," he said quietly. "Did they tell you?"

"Yeah." Clay's eyes dropped. "I know."

If there was any doubt left to hope for, Clay's quiet acceptance let is go.

"She betrayed us," Desmond said. "All along...damn it! How could she?"

"Desmond," said Clay, and something in his voice made him still. "Did they tell you why?"

Desmond's eyes slipped to the gravel under his feet. It felt like the false friendship of repeating cruel gossip. "He said it was because you were going crazy. That she turned us in to save you somehow."

"She was right."

Desmond threw a look at their watcher and back to Clay. "Come on."

"It was only supposed to be me they got. You were in the wrong place. And it's true, I was losing it. They say it's pretty common. My guy Sibrand, he went through kind of the same thing. It's good to know it's not all in your head." 

The dry rooftop wind tugged at Desmond's sweatshirt. He wasn't certain if he knew this Clay, whose face was not hollow and who spoke easily of his Templar. 

With a sudden, sharp suspicion, fiercely wishing that they were in private: "Did they drug you?" 

Clay waved his hand. "Nah. See, the first thing they showed me is that I was right about them controlling the world, controlling history. Believe me, you don't know how huge a relief it was to know I hadn't gone crazy already. Sibrand said he did the same thing before he got recruited; saw all the signs and secrets, and started to think he was raving loony because nobody else cared."

"We listened to you." Desmond was getting scared. If Clay went over, he would truly be alone. "You were right." 

"I was right about the past. The present, though..." He rubbed his hand through his hair. "Look. You know what the truth is? When they broke down the door, I was relieved. A person can't live like that, running scared forever, waiting for the axe to drop." 

"I understand that," Desmond admitted. "It's hard being afraid all the time." He caught Clay's eyes and tried to communicate through force of will alone. "But I wouldn't trade it for being normal. Never." 

"They can't do that. They wouldn't if they could." He often spoke that way, in the rising tone with building speed, when he was about to explain something important. Then he changed tack, with a slicing gesture through the air between them. "Have you seen this machine they have?" 

"The Animus? Yeah, they put me in, it's this whole other guy's life. An Assassin, like..." Desmond gestured to the both of them, in a regretful, self-deprecating way. "...us." 

"It's more than just a person. It's the whole old world, in all the mess it used to be, everything that doesn't exist anymore. All the old lunacy locked up in one invention. It pulls it all straight out of our DNA." 

There was something strange and intense in his eyes, like there often was in the puddles of moonlight that fell through the warehouse windows. 

"Think about it. It makes what we were doing before look ridiculous. How can a couple of odd men out fight people who have things like that? And who knows what else." 

His voice dropped down and trailed off in resignation.

For an instant not caring that Robert was listening, Desmond moved toward him and said, "You can't give up. That's what they want." 

"I know." Suddenly, Clay looked tired. "But they could do whatever they want to us, Desmond, and all they've done is make sense." 

As Robert took him into the elevator, Desmond didn't know whether to feel relieved or more alone than ever. Clay was alive and sane. He was safe. He had not become one of the Templars. 

And it was clear in every word and gesture that he was considering their offer. And Desmond had to face the fact that so was he. 

Robert left him. Whenever Desmond tried to think, to grasp a thread and untangle it all from the beginning, his mind lost hold. The sky out the window was bright and cloudless, a different shade than when it was directly overhead. When he took his sweatshirt off something fell out of the hood. 

Desmond bent and retrieved the folded piece of paper that nestled between the carpet fibers. He stood facing a blank wall with no place for a camera to be hidden. He opened it, closely and carefully, and found an ink sketch of an eagle.


	11. Chapter 11

Nineteen steps from one end of the room to the other, along the glass wall, from one corner to the plant with thick plastic leaves placed to catch the sun. Nineteen steps to a turn and then back again, never enough to grasp the full significance of the ink eagle staring unblinking from the wide field of white. The paper that rested in his pocket and told him that, whatever he said, Clay was fighting. He was trying to tell him something important.

Desmond paced and found no answers. He ran his eyes over the spines of the books on the shelf and thought of nothing. He took a shower and watched the soapy water run down his arms.

In the kitchen, he unfolded the paper and turned on the burner of the stove. The risk was divided between the possibility of cameras watching him and the danger of holding the paper too close to the fire. In a moment of air that wavered with heat, the blank edges crawled with crabbed brown marks.

Numbers.

Across the top was written,  
5 1 16 8 20 1 5 9 20 3 4 2 2 10 5 9 9

At the left edge:  
3 12 9 18 1 20 3 4 20 17 18 9 16

And the right:  
17 16 9 15 17 16 3 12

At the bottom, below the eagle's talons:  
4 10 4 8 17 16 3 2 9 1 22 9 3 12 9 16 4 16 9 22 9 5 23 4 2 2

_"You suck at this," Clay said cheerfully._

_"Shut up." Desmond gnawed on the end of the pen. "It's not my fault this doesn't make any sense. What am I even looking for?"_

_"Oh good," he heard Shaun say behind them. "You've found someone else to harass with those things."_

_"Your turn's next," said Clay._

Desmond kept the message in his pocket. He knew he should burn it, but not until he understood the secret. It waited there, folded slender as a stiletto, when Robert came to see him. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him not to gloat, but he knew he wouldn't.

"So Clay's considering your offer," Desmond said, finally. In his head, the phrase was _turning traitor._

Robert only nodded solemnly, looking at him. He said, "Are you?"

Desmond looked away.

"I need to see more of it. More of the past." _More of you._

Because if the Assassins weren't pure, Desmond was starting to think the Templar wasn't, either. He, like Desmond, was not what he was supposed to be. He could pass the boundaries that kept normal people safe.

In the darkness as the elevator dropped, Desmond thought of five, one, sixteen, eight, twenty.

_"The simplest thing is just to give each letter a number. You know, a is one, b is two."_

_Desmond tried it. "Doesn't work."_

_"Of course not." Clay sounded insulted. "I wouldn't make it that easy."_

_"You're such an asshole."_

_"Keep trying!"_

The Animus screen closed over Desmond like a new sky.

In the open square in front of the cathedral, fury clawed him when he thought he was too late to stop the murder. He forgot the name and the purpose and only saw the knives. Ezio saved Lorenzo de Medici. Desmond never knew that a person could have so much blood. His arm was heavy over his shoulder, and Ezio looked over frequently, certain that he was carrying a corpse. He heard the shout of guards and set down his burden to dispatch them. He buried his sword in a guard's stomach and wrenched it free as the man gasped the the eyes beneath his helmet faded from shock to blankness. It was not something he gave thought to anymore. When he picked up Lorenzo the man still breathed. Ezio lead him to safety, weapons at the ready, and felt warm wetness soak through the arm of his robe. Lorenzo lived, and Ezio felt a grim satisfaction as he gained more names.

The white horizon swept away. In the shock of the real world's close walls, Desmond sat up and found himself trembling.

This was something that could happen. You could push metal into someone's body, through the surreal gush of blood, until the damage was too much to handle, and they would die.

"He gets used to it so fast." His voice and his language sounded dissonant and unfamiliar. "Why can't I?"

"You aren't him." Robert's hand was on his shoulder. The weight and reality were frightening. "Enough for today."

Desmond shook his head, though it made the room move more than it should. "Put me back in. I'm not done."

He couldn't read Robert's eyes before the big Templar turned away and gave the techs the command.

First Ezio found another page of the Codex written by Altair, who Desmond had always half-thought was legend or invention, a story like Robin Hood, but here were his words and his doubts. Then, one by one, Ezio sought out the conspirators. Every time an archer shouted at him to get down from a roof, Desmond had to lean away from the urge to obey and toward Ezio's instinct to break the line of sight. From the distance of the present, Robert's voice told him who they had been, their goals and crimes, in words that were almost wry. Francesco de'Pazzi, father to follow son. Bernardo Baroncelli, hiding in the crowds and flinching at shadows until one found him. Stefano de Bagnone, torturer for the Templars, who Ezio followed as he spoke of the madness of faith, and who died with the comfort that he would then know if he was right. Francesco Salviati, who fought beside his soldiers. Antonio Maffei, shouting of demons, maddened by fear. Jacopo de'Pazzi, betrayed, and in the carnage of the attack that followed Ezio found an instant to end his suffering. As he ended the lives of each, his hatred morphed to something else. A cool, unyielding determination that shared flavors with the lingering grief and loss.

When Desmond came out Robert told him it had been hours, and nothing he said could get him back in again.

_"I'll give you a hint. See, another kind of cypher is you take the alphabet and the corresponding numbers, right, and you put a code word in front, and take out the doubled letters. Say you have...OSTRICH, or something. Then O is one, S is two, and then A, B, D are eight, nine, ten."_

_"'Ostrich?'"_

_"Quiet Becca, I'm trying to teach him something."_

_"You'll need all the quiet in the world for that."_

_"You too, Shaun."_

_"How about you_ all _shut up?" Desmond said as his pencil scratched around the numbers on the sheet._

It was better when he was back in what he thought of as his room, cell or not. He didn't like the way the techs stared at him as though he was a foreign and dangerous creature, like a tiger let out of its cage for a walk. The room was quiet, and the murmuring life of Renaissance Italy echoed in his ears. He almost felt as though he could still see it out of the corner of his eye, in the empty spaces.

He itched for the next day to come so he could go back into the Animus. More than the urgency in Clay's eyes when he talked about, more than the draw of a free, mad, bloody world, he wanted to see where Ezio's story took him. He could look it up, but he doubted he'd find much, let alone anything true. The databases and history books were theirs.

Desmond looked out the window, down at the canyons of the city he hadn't been to for weeks, and said, "Has anybody asked why I'm missing?"

"Your family has been told you're safe."

"That easy, huh." Called up politely, and that was that. A few weeks ago Desmond wouldn't have known why that was strange. People in the past world reconstructed by the machine were different. They asked questions. They made demands. "You could've said I was on vacation to Mars. They'd believe anything except the truth. Kidnapped by Templars, the ones who protect us and keep the world moving. The good guys. Is it even physically possible to believe?"

Desmond was pacing again. Ezio's righteous anger was in his blood.

Robert watched him calmly from the couch. "For most people, no."

"Did you see the way they schemed in Ezio's time? Just one city, and they must have been scheming to take it over for years. What's it like to keep the whole world under control and not even have to try?"

Robert intoned, "Boring as shit."

_"So what's the code word?"_

_Clay's eyes lit up in the glow of the Coleman lantern, and he leaned forward. "Five assassinations and one death-"_

_"It's Rasputin," Shaun called over the edge of his book. Clay glared. "What? I don't want to listen to you being cryptic and him being dense all night."_

_"Thanks," Desmond said cheerfully, filling in the cypher._

Desmond turned to look at him and try to gauge what game he was playing.

"What you're thinking is right," said Robert, as normally and casually as if they were regular people, not parts of a war that had gone on in the shadows of thousands of years until his side won. "For the peacekeepers, there is nothing as dull as absolute peace. There's no resistance."

"Except us."

Robert inclined his head. "Except you."

"That's it." Desmond's wrist performed a twisting flick by his side. The realization was a relief, because it was good and right to be able to hate him. Venom poured into his voice, that anger that had never made sense in the real world until he'd found out what he was. "That's why you let us exist. It's a game and you need somebody to play against. But it's too easy to wipe us out, so you're keeping us alive to make us converts, for the fucking challenge. If you get us, are we trophies? Do you keep score?"

"There's more to it than that," said Robert, and there was a solemn intensity to his face that made Desmond afraid.

Robert took a device out of his pocket and touched a button. Desmond said, "What are you doing?"

"Turning the cameras off."

_Desmond stared incredulously at the decrypted message._

_"YOU SUCK AT THIS?"_

_Balling up the paper and flinging it at Clay only made him cackle harder._

"We need you."

Desmond set a hand on the hilt of a throwing knife that wasn't there. The sinking sun stole every color but burnt umber. "For what?"

Robert clasped his hands between his knees. He looked- what? Tired? Honest? "You've guessed that the means of control can't be directed. It is everyone or no one. People who are naturally immune like you and I, like Lucy and your friends, we are rare. One in thousands has the resistance, and that is only the beginning of what we need. Some are complacent and ignore their ability. The ones who try to fight back are those with courage, intelligence, and will. Like you."

His eyes were steady on Desmond.

"A brainwashed lackey is not what we want. We have those, and sheep need shepherds. We aren't asking you to join the conquered, Desmond; we need you to become one of the rulers."

Desmond could say nothing. It was as if the next word he said would shatter whatever frail sanity was left in the world.

He wet dry lips and managed, "You said ruling the world was boring as shit."

For a minute, Robert stared at him. Then there was a low, rumbling laugh.

"It can be, but it has its good points. Think about it," he said before he left.

At any other time Desmond wouldn't be able to do anything but obey, but now what he noticed was that, maybe in a sort of show of good faith, Robert hadn't turned the cameras back on. For safety's sake, still, he sat at an angle to cover the scrap of paper he took from his pocket and unfolded.

He tried the word EAGLE, removing the second E. The output was gibberish. He thought of the Codex, and for an instant the light changed to candles, and the constant faint cool chemical scent to wood and paint, and the silence to Leonardo's murmurs. He tried the word ALTAIR, removing the second A.

He worked more quickly than he ever had in the safety of the warehouse.

Desmond went to the kitchen. He turned on a burner on the stove, touched the edge of the note to the flame, and watched the line of orange advance. He wiped up the ashes and washed them down the sink. The image of the note was sealed in his head.

Across the top was written:  
R AND S ARE STILL FREE

At the left edge:  
THE PAST IS OPEN

And the right:  
ONE MONTH

At the bottom, below the eagle's talons:  
IF I DONT LEAVE THEN I NEVER WILL


	12. Chapter 12

When Desmond woke up, he knew what Clay had been trying to tell him. 

The answers were in the Animus. They could censor and change words, but not images taken straight from the blood. If there was any answer to find for how the Templars had done this, it waited in the reconstruction of the old world. To one side of his mind, Desmond could sense an echo of the determination that Ezio might feel if it were him.

One month. Until what? Rescue? Abandonment? Until Clay gave in?

What he knew was that if the truth was in the past, he had that long to find it. 

By now, Desmond put his hands out for the cuffs by habit. 

Every time, when he was looking up at the tiled ceiling and his spine was cradled by the machine's gently humming surface, Robert gave him the look that asked if he was sure. He always waited for Desmond's nod before sliding the needle into his arm. By the time Venice appeared, his doubts and fears for the future were gone. Ezio cared only for now. 

Desmond, riding in his skin, tried to understand him. Could people have really once been this way? So cavalier? Things that normal people would have to force themselves through a sick sweat to contemplate, these phantoms from the past did as easily as shaking hands. He became used to guards trying to kill him. It appeared to be their job. It was more difficult to accept when he was ambushed on the way to Venice and they thought nothing of killing Leonardo da Vinci, of all people, to get at him. 

Desmond was getting better at holding on, but it was sometimes small things that wrenched him out. He thought he'd gotten a handle on how things worked. Guards were like police, he knew about those. They kept peace and order. It made sense for them to oppose an Assassin. Then he saw them harass and arrest a man for doing nothing more than selling fish, and before he knew it his indignation and bafflement threw him bodily out of the past. 

"People made no sense," he groaned, rubbing eyes that ached from facing close white walls after the vibrant colors. "All over some goddamn money." 

"When power could belong to anyone, people were driven by snatching for petty scraps of it for themselves," said Robert. He'd told the techs to pay no attention to anything he and Desmond said to each other. It was almost the same as privacy.

"So the Templars took it all for safekeeping." 

"Someone had to." His expression said: _Someone like you._

Desmond dove in again and again, though he would come out shaking and itching to wash away the dried blood from between his fingers. It was the kindnesses that were strangest, in the world where cruelty was possible. 

One night there was a dream of slipping knives between the ribs of guards, hanging out of sight with his heart pounding and the thrill of the hunt high in his veins, leaping down and slicing his blade through the rich robes and into Emilio Barbarigo's heart, and what woke him into the shock of the dark and silent room was the murmur of _Do not be afraid._

Desmond paced by the window and tried to stay in his own skin until the sky above the city bled its palette toward dawn. The sun was up when the door made its beep and click and Robert appeared. If the Templar noticed anything was off, he said nothing.

"How'd you get dragged into all this?" Desmond asked Robert over coffee and toast, bizarre normal things that existed inside the lair of a world-spanning regime. "You a volunteer?" 

"Some, like you, can blend in well enough to stay secret. For others, the difference is obvious from a young age." 

"Obvious how?" 

"A boy in school annoyed me and I punched him in the face." 

Desmond snorted a laugh. "That's pretty obvious." 

"The way of the world was new at the time. I didn't realize I was different until they found me." 

"So you never had a choice." Desmond stirred his coffee, watching the ripples spin around. Templars had some incredible coffee. 

Robert looked surprised, like that had never occurred to him. "I had more choice than almost anyone else in the world."

A warm breeze toyed with the hair on the back of his neck. The blacksmith across the lane cried the quality of his workmanship. "That doesn't strike you as a problem?" 

"You've seen the past, Desmond." The kitchen wall came back into place behind Robert, blocking out the sky. "Tell me if you would have humanity return to suffering, fear and want for the sake of a philosophical concept. I know what answer you'll find. You are not cruel." 

"I know, I know," Desmond sighed. "What we've got is a perfect happy paradise-world, don't screw with it." 

"Did I say that?" 

There was something in his voice, somewhere between irony, acknowledgment, and restlessness. 

After a while Robert said, "You have the choice. Choosing what's right doesn't mean you have to like it." 

In the Animus, Ezio crept through the shadows and dispensed what he knew was justice, and Desmond realized that the cool satisfaction at an elegant kill was his as well. Every death brought him closer to something greater, the secret that was here and that Clay trusted him to find. 

Time loomed over Desmond even as he lost touch with its immediate meaning. There was no certainty outside of the marks etched with his nail through the paint on the inside of the closet door, marching in ragged ranks toward thirty. Sometimes he would come out of the Animus knowing in his muscles and bones it had been days since he'd seen the ceiling with its florescent lights, but Robert would tell him it had only been a few hours. He never let Desmond stay in for longer than that at a time, and pushing too hard for more would raise suspicions he couldn't answer.

Something of his eagerness must have shown, because soon, before letting him in, Robert told him, "The Animus is an irreplaceable tool, but it is also dangerous." 

"How?" Desmond sat up on the machine and cracked his neck. His body was always stiff and ungainly when he came out, as though trying to reconcile the leaping, climbing, and fighting in his neurons with the lying still his muscles were certain of. "It's all an illusion. I've gotten killed a dozen times and it only hurt for a second." 

"I don't mean physical harm." There was quiet concern in Robert's eyes, and he was not the kind of person who jumped at shadows. "The past is a foreign country, and the longer you stay, the more difficult it is to leave."

It was something else that he was right about but didn't matter. Desmond sought the mystery the past pointed towards, and every time he went into that senseless, painful, maddening world, it was harder to come out. 

Robert asked him questions. 

"What year is it?"

"Two thousand thirteen," said Desmond.

"Are you having headaches?" 

"No," said Desmond.

"Experiencing hallucinations?" 

"No," said Desmond, struggling to hear him over the herald's cry, and watching ghostly mercenaries stride behind his back.

It became a ritual of time as sure as the marks on the closet door, scratched with a fingernail through the paint. 

The technicians for the Animus changed. The man who brought him food changed, though Desmond noticed this one also had a tazer on his hip, just in case. It was difficult to tell the difference. He wondered if his window was a screen that ran the image of setting sun or night sky or cars stopping and moving in endless cycles at the traffic light. He wondered if the world outside was changing. He wondered if there was a world outside.

In a month he would know the answer, either to that or to something else. 

Ezio flew in a construct of wood and canvas, and killed men, and sought a prophet. 

In the middle of darting across the rooftops with the night wind and a pair of guards at his back, his vision slipped. He jumped across a narrow alley and froze with his arm outstretched, fingers grasping for the edge, as Venice went bright white and dissolved in blocks with a sound like something cutting through the air. 

Desmond was on his back and there was a voice over him barking words he couldn't understand until the echo of Italian gave way.

"-didn't you _tell_ me it needed to be replaced?" 

"Your orders were to have the Animus ready for use, sir." 

"Not if you knew it would--" Robert broke off with a harsh exhalation and rubbed the bridge of his nose. 

"I'm sorry sir." There was confusion as well as honest contrition on the technician's face. 

"Fix it." 

The technician murmured assent and was soon placidly working at the console. 

Desmond sat up and watched with calm interest. The hum of the Animus grew louder and softer according to whatever the tech was doing, and had an unfamiliar note of discord. Robert caught sight of him and approached. 

"Are you all right?" 

"Yeah, it just faded out kind of suddenly." Desmond touched his temple gingerly. It was always strange to see softer hands and wrists without gauntlets. Coming out of the past made the present distant in some ways, and in other ways clearer. He watched the technicians confer. "You hate them, don't you." 

Robert gave him a look, then sat on the Animus beside him, folding his large hands.

"You would be surprised," he said quietly, "how little it matters." 

_"So you're saying everybody's drugged or something?" Desmond said._

_"That's the thing," Lucy said, lips pursed. "We don't know."_

_Shaun had the focused, excited look he got when he was interested in something enough to forget to be insulting. "Something in the water, that's the obvious place to look, but from the records we hacked into-"_

_"You're welcome," Rebecca called._

_"-from what these records say, this 'sanity' took hold over a single day. Twenty-four hours to affect every man, woman, and child in the world. Every single source of fresh water. Even for Abstergo the logistics simply aren't feasible."_

_Clay might have said not to underestimate them, but that was a day when he wasn't talking to anyone but himself._

_"Okay," Desmond said, "What about something in the air, then?"_

_Shaun waved his hand. "Wouldn't work. There's the same problem of getting it evenly distributed over the entire face of the planet, and that's before even getting into the problem of dosage. Drugs, sedatives, they're fiddly things. They'd have to find an amount that would work on a twenty-stone man without hurting his little newborn baby. Any dose high enough to make a difference would've killed thousands, millions of people. And it would have to work for everyone in exactly the same way, no variation in response, no side effects. Completely impossible. No drug is that perfect."_

_"So they've got some sort of secret weapon that is perfect," Desmond said. "How can we fight that?"_

_"It's actually our advantage." Lucy put her hand on his arm. Her eyes gleamed with ambition. "Perfection makes them lazy, and lazy people get sloppy."_

Now he could move through crowds as easily as breathing. He flowed through the piazza as a part of them, difficult to notice and easy to forget. Carnivale was bright and manic around him. People in masks, dancing and shouting, drunk and exuberant, a man in a shadowed corner with a woman's arms wound around him, people magnified and hidden from the bonds of their normal lives and never knowing how frail those were, lights in the night. Weaving between them, hidden in sight, was the shadow where Ezio belonged. He was so close to the secret, he could feel it waiting, pulsing like a beating heart. A hand grabbed his arm. 

_"Che cosa?"_ Ezio demanded. _Not now._ "I have done nothing wrong." 

"Look at me," the guard said. The shadow of his helmet covered his eyes. 

"Let go." He was trying to take him away. The spring-loaded blade waited at Ezio's wrist. 

"Come back." Behind him a juggler threw torches that left lingering lines of flame across the sky. 

They were going to take him and lock him up in a cell like his father, where he would never see sky that wasn't through bars and there would be the constant mechanical sigh of the ventilation instead of screams or laughter or cries of wonder at the fireworks that boomed above them and stained them sunset red. "Let go of me!" 

With a flick of his free wrist Ezio's blade leapt free and he sank it home in the guard's abdomen, through his armor without resistance. What struck against his palm was cloth and a body of hard muscle. The grip did not loosen and he did not bleed. 

"Calm down. You must stop!" 

Ezio twisted and the guard who was too strong grabbed his other hand, so he kicked and won a grunt of pain and the chance to turn and run. A woman in a blue gown and peacock feather mask gasped at the spectacle. With a sickening lurch as of falling he stumbled through her. 

The body that grabbed him and threw him to the ground was one he remembered. The colors shifted and bled.

Desmond's face pressed against carpet, not cobblestones. 

Robert was saying, "Desmond. Desmond. Can you hear me?" 

Desmond tries to get out from under him. He growled in irritation. He wasn't even allowed to watch the dream to its conclusion. _"Ti sento, io sono sveglio."_

"Desmond!" He shook him by the shoulders hard enough that his bones seemed to realign. "What year is it?" 

"I don't know, all right?" Desmond stared at the carpet he'd paced a hundred times. For an instant he caught the scent of smoke from a torch thrown high in the air to compete with the stars. Then it was gone. "Just let me go." 

Robert got off him and Desmond got to his feet, ignoring the Templar's hand. The world tilted, he pitched forward, and Robert grabbed him anyway. Feeling a touch that matched what his other senses took in had a visceral intensity. Through his shirt he could feel the crease in the arm of Robert's jacket along his back.

"You've been lying," said Robert as he guided him to the couch. His voice had a note of reproach, as though Desmond owed him something. 

"Yeah. Forgot I could do that, huh?" 

Robert sat beside him without letting go. "How bad are the hallucinations?" 

Desmond picked at the couch cushion and didn't answer. 

"No more of the Animus," Robert said. 

"What? No!" The sharp turn of Desmond's head made the apartment whirl around him. "I have to go back, just a few more times." Ezio was close, _he_ was close, something in his blood knew it. 

The bald Templar shook his head firmly. "It isn't worth the risk."

Desmond felt the ground crumbling from under his feet. He didn't know whether it was the effect of the Animus or of feeling that whatever Clay entrusted him to find was spinning out of his reach. "You're the one who put me in there in the first place." 

"If the past was going to change your mind, it would have been done by now. You've seen more than enough." 

_And done a lot of it,_ Desmond thought with a sick feeling and the iron smell of blood. "You can't cut me off just like that." 

"I can." Robert had the look of someone who wasn't used to being argued with. Obedience came with authority, and there was no higher authority than Templar. 

He thought of never being in Ezio's skin again. He thought of standing on top of a church tower in Venice as the bells rang, heart high in his throat, feeling the wind tug his sleeves as he spread his arms and fell forward to fly. He thought of the secret he would never find.

Desmond was laughing, and the look of concern on Robert's face made him laugh harder. 

"Jesus. Do you even notice how crazy this it? You, my worst enemy, the guy I've been on the run from ever since I found out I'm not like everybody else, you're keeping me out of a machine you put me in in the first place to try to convince me to help you play god and be tyrant guardian angel for brainwashed sheep-people you can't stand. You hate the way the world is and you're the one keeping it that way. This is what you call sane?" 

Moving faster, palpable as a rapid strike of mass, Robert grabbed Desmond by the shirtfront and hauled him up to his face. He was by no measure a small man and Robert handled him like a ragdoll. He always had thought that his punches were holding back. 

"Listen to me," he said, as if Desmond had a choice. "This world is not for us. You fight against something you refuse to understand. Your ancestors in the order you are trying to keep alive did nothing but murder and hope that someone better would come along to fill the gap. The Templars you despise have made a world where there is no more suffering, no more men dying alone in the dust or children hanged with their brothers. We have given them bread and miracles. You've seen what humans did when they had freedom; they proved they did not deserve to be free." 

Robert's eyes had a fervor that could burn a hole in him. Desmond's pulse quickened at the physical danger, an echo from Ezio's world. 

Suddenly he wanted to tell him everything. He wanted to make his enemy understand. "I was-" 

He could feel Robert's knuckles jabbing against his collarbone. "You were a terrorist, Desmond." 

This was the moment when a smart man, a rational man, would surrender. He was right, he had always been right, with a force as constant as gravity and inevitable as the ground beneath. 

"I'm a free person," Desmond said, throwing it in his face like an accusation, "and no matter how much you pretend, so are you."

In the instant of breath after, he thought of the most humanly insane thing he could do, and kissed him.

Robert's mouth was softer than he thought, and there was something satisfying in the shock in the shape of his lips. He had to lean up to do it, and expected the next thing he felt to be his body flying across the room like a flung ragdoll. Instead the big man was very still. The huge hands on Desmond's shoulders did not push him far.

"What," Robert said very quietly, looking at him like he'd morphed into something strange and dangerous, "do you think you're doing?" 

"I've seen how you look at me. You think I'm special, and if it was just the job you wouldn't care so much." Desmond was throwing words out like grapnel lines, hoping for something to catch. "You're sick of being safe and doing everything you're supposed to. I know I would be. You can lie but you never have to so you're not much good at it." He licked his lips, tongue catching on the scar that tasted of someone else's mouth. "So, yeah, to the point? Seducing you." 

Desmond climbed on top of Robert, grabbing him by his jacket's lapels. His legs were firm and solid as tree trunks. His heart was pounding. This was stupid, and that was why he wanted to do it so badly. He still wasn't being smashed into the wall. He thought it was going to happen when Robert's fingers slowly laced around the back of his head, but that was to draw him in for a slower kiss this time, deeper and premeditated. Slow and thoughtful, but Desmond didn't want to think, so he rushed in hard and used the whole weight of his body to knock Robert sideways on the couch and land on top of him. He knew he was being humored and allowed, and that gave him a clean, bright anger that kept him from slipping back into the sane. He kissed him again. He didn't understand the shock of feeling stubble rasp against his cheek until he realized the horror belonged to Ezio, Ezio from the world where people could be hated or hanged. He smelled the breeze off the canal, and his clutching fingers tore the red and white pin off Robert's jacket. 

"You're too clean," Desmond breathed as he straddled him and pulled off his hoodie and shirt so the cool, recycled air made pinpricks run down his arms. "I want to mess you up." 

"You've done that," Robert said, and if Desmond had seen him smile before, it was never like this. 

Desmond pulled his tie loose and tossed it away. Robert shrugged his jacket off his shoulders with a casual grace that was fascinating up close. He wore his mass with a control and ease that made it seem as though it were everyone else who was out of scale. Tiny buttons ran down his crisp white shirt. Desmond grabbed at the collar and tore them off, and took joy in the petty destruction. Robert's hands had the warmth he needed. When one of Robert's arms steadied him while the other worked off his pants, it occurred to Desmond that it was possible to be afraid, but the Templar uniform was kicked away and anything to fear went with it. 

It wasn't until Robert nodded that Desmond realized he'd looked to him for permission. He explored the big man's body with his hands, fascinated at how real he felt, how undeniable. He was thick and solid where Desmond was wiry. It was so strange this could be happening here and now, that he was the one touching him. This was not predetermined. Desmond was the one who decided that his hand would travel under Robert's pectoral and down his ribs, between the muscles of his stomach.

"Christ, no wonder you barely moved when I punched you." His abdomen was like oak under Desmond's fingertips. "It must've been funny." 

"I saw your courage." His fingers ran through Desmond's hair. "I was glad you were mine." 

Desmond would have laughed at the idea of craving the company of someone who would attack you, if he hadn't understood. He kissed Robert again, and held onto the hard curve of his shoulders as the man's big hands undid his pants. He smelled like expensive cologne and the touch of vanity was so normal and human that it assuaged a rending, aching loneliness Desmond hadn't known was there. He thought of laughing people in masks and jugglers throwing fire at the stars, and threw his body onto Robert as though grabbing for something that floated in a flood. He was there and kept being there from moment to moment, kept continuous by the sound of his breath growing faster. Desmond's cock caught against him and the pulse of heat was a shock he was in no way prepared for, and he gasped and held tight to him and did it again and again.

"God," he kept whispering, "god." 

Robert's hand on the small of his back guided him. When Desmond's cock pressed against his he let out a breath of desire that broke his ability to hold back in half and it was all his body then, with this untouchable man who was human and who wanted him, who he wanted, whose body seared electricity into his and whose gasps in his ear were beautiful. The power of being able to affect him like this swept over Desmond and made him shake, and Robert's leg hooked around him, and Robert's teeth scraped his neck hard enough to hurt, and he grabbed him and his hips bucked and there was no such thing as control. 

Desmond lay on top of him after, as his breath came back and his heart slowed down, and saw what his eyes looked like close up. They talked a little about small things that wouldn't sway the strange, unexpected balance struck between them. Outside the window the faint city stars were up. He lay with his face resting on Robert's shoulder and watched the moon. It was quiet except for the hum of the ventilation, and for a while, they both forgot about the past.


	13. Chapter 13

"I have to know," Desmond said, when he thought he could say it best.

"Hmm?" It was a rumble in Robert's chest that Desmond could feel along the length of his body. 

"What happens to Ezio when he gets his revenge. You don't know what kind of story it is until you get to the end, right? I've killed so many people...I have to know if it was worth it."

Robert's arm tightened around him. "You are not your ancestor, Desmond. You're better than anything he could have imagined." 

Desmond fought off the encroaching fog of guilt. "I know I'm not the one who killed them, really. Still, I just have to know if killing can mean anything." 

He laid his head on Robert's chest and listened to the rise and fall of his breathing for a while before he closed his eyes and said, "Once I have that answer, then I'll have yours." 

It was quiet for a long time.

Robert said, "Rest." 

_"You ever wonder what it's like to be normal?"_

_"Yeah." Clay took a drink from the Absolut bottle and passed it along the circle. "I've wondered what it's like to be blind and deaf, too."_

_"I mean," Desmond persisted, "it could be kind of a relief, never having to worry that you're doing anything wrong. You're never even tempted."_

_"Must be weird." Becca leaned back on her hands, legs stretched in front of her, joggling her feet. "Like, you try to think about doing something you're not supposed to, and bleeeeeeehhhhh."_

_"Lovely impression, very informative," said Shaun._

_"Thanks!"_

_"It's sort of sad," said Lucy, "when you see someone wander away like that. I wonder if it feels safer to be like that, though, knowing for sure that you're a good person, that you're not capable of all the horrible things people used to do to each other."_

_"You wouldn't believe some of it," said Shaun. The Coleman lantern in the center of the circle turned him blue-pale and gave his gesture a looming, grandiose shadow. "Did you know that when the Emperor Tiberius uncovered a plot against him, not only did he have anyone remotely related to the ringleader killed, he refused to let any family members mourn over or bury the bodies, and eventually the whole rotting pile was thrown into the river?"_

_Lucy grimaced. "I didn't need to know that."_

_"Hell, you guys don't know." Desmond took the bottle, took a swig, and grinned. "Once we break everybody free, I'll ask them."_

Desmond didn't press any more about the Animus. The knowledge that pushing too hard would destroy his chance was as certain and inexorable as the marks in the paint on the closet door. Instead he scratched the three days that followed into the wood and when Robert appeared he grabbed him by the tie and kissed him, tasting something dangerous, insane, and wonderful. He'd never known how much he was holding down until it burst free, frightening him with its intensity and ferocity, with the sharp heat of Robert's skin against his and the rasp of his breath on his ear when Desmond raked his nails down his back.

It was when the sun was sinking behind the buildings outside the window, when Desmond was sprawled across the couch and Robert's lap, that Robert said, "Tomorrow, if you're ready."

Desmond knew what he meant, and he was. When the sun rose he made the diagonal mark through the paint on the door to complete the sixth set of five. He was ready to find the secret that Ezio's life was shaped toward. When Robert came Desmond reached up to link his arms around his neck, and the way the Templar kissed him said that he knew too. 

The room with the Animus looked and smelled the same, with the same clean walls and soft hum, but the only technician was Lucy. 

"Hi," she said, with the same shy smile and a red and white pin on her blouse. 

"Lucy," Desmond managed, and little else. Then: "You've been here all along?" 

Her eyes fell, and it may have been optimism that made him believe he saw regret. "I thought you wouldn't want to see me. I understand that. But I would never do anything to hurt you."

"Why'd you do it, Lucy?" He would not look away from her face. 

"To keep you from hurting anyone. People," she paused and bit her lip, "like us, we're capable of anything. not all of the groups are like yours. Some of them are planning murders or bombings before we stop them. There was one that had a whole cache of old rifles and grenades in a warehouse a lot like ours. I hated lying to you Desmond - you have no idea how much I hated it - but it was the only way." 

He shook his head, trying to be indifferent to the earnest entreaty on her face. "Why did you side with them?" 

She didn't even hesitate. 

"Because they're right. You've seen what people were like, Desmond. Without us, nothing would have ever changed." She looked away at the Animus' screen. "I made the right choice. Even if you hate me, I hope you will too." 

"Lucy. I don't hate you." Relief washed over her face, and he felt a wave of terrible sadness. "But I can't forgive you, either." 

_Clay was curled in the shadow of a crate, animal whimpering sounds coming from his throat._

_"They're everywhere, everyone. We can't escape. Their lies are in us where we can't even see. Anything we do is their plan, walking right into their trap and there's no help coming, we're alone."_

_"Shh," Lucy said, her hands on his shoulders. "It's okay."_

_Reason didn't work when he was like this._

_"You're safe," she said, over and over, until he believed it._

He had two overlapping thoughts that would not stop: _You betrayed us_ and _You saved him._

For a moment, she closed her eyes. "I know you'll be able to understand, in time."

There was only so much of that. 

"That's what I'm here for," he said, sounding less bitter than he expected. 

And it was strange how it was easier, with Lucy above him instead of a docile stranger, to let go of himself and fall into the past. 

Ezio's long path of revenge was nearly complete. The momentum of his vengeance was built to the breaking point, and he ran over the rooftops of the night toward the man at the center of his loss. From the rafters of the Sistine Chapel he struck with the grace and ferocity won by years of killing. Then the world turned magical and mad. Rodrigo raised his staff and a terrible pressure bore down on him and all the others assembled there. It was Ezio's eyes that passed down the rows of subjugated nobles, but not him who recognized the docile helplessness all alike on each face. Ezio was different. He could resist. The golden sphere he held pushed back against the assault like an opposing tide. He felt the strangeness twist through him and thought, _It was not made for warfare._

Yet it freed him to run for Rodrigo, let him break into many of himself, and they fought wielding artifacts neither of them understood. At the edge of victory the staff held Ezio in midair with a terrible strength, and he could do nothing against the agony of Rodrigo's dagger plunging into him. 

An Auditore did not die easily. An Assassin fought to live. He staunched the blood and pressed on. 

This time it was nothing but fists, and the impact of his knuckles on the Borgia's face brought a burst of vicious satisfaction that was nothing next to seeing him fall. Every death had been a step closer to this moment. His blade was there. The inevitability was complete. 

Here was an old man, his dreams of power shattered at their apex, speaking bravado while fear tightened the fine lines around his eyes. A line of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth. He was waiting.

Ezio turned away. 

He descended into the vault. 

_("-black? What's gone wrong? Get him out!")_

_("I can't. The Animus isn't responding to anything- but look, his brain activity-")_

There a woman made of light told him that one day the world would change. Humanity would live without sin. She told him how it had happened, and she told him how to stop it. 

She said, "There will be a choice, Desmond." 

Desmond opened his eyes to Robert and Lucy's faces above him and the screen sliding away. 

"Are you all right?" Robert's hand laid on his arm. "What happened?" 

There was something like fear around his eyes. 

"Must've been a glitch," Desmond said. "I was stuck on the loading screen for a long time." 

He was shaky. Robert had to help him sit up. In all the confusion of clarity there was a sudden, sharp loss in wondering if he would ever see Ezio again.

In the darkness as he was lead back, as he leaned against Robert's side more than balance needed him to, he thought _I am with you_ and was glad, because an Assassin fought to live. 

When his hands were freed and he was blinking in the sudden light, the sky and shining glass buildings he saw every day were in front of him, and for the first time he understood that they were beautiful. From the moment Desmond had emerged from the machine, he could feel Robert waiting for his answer. Instead he grabbed him and pulled him down so he could kiss him, and let himself accept that he was beautiful too. 

Robert fucked him with steady eyes and singleminded focus, his hands as gentle as anyone who had spent his lifetime holding back. Desmond's fingers dug into the corded arc where his shoulder became his neck, and he didn't hold back his cries. 

In the quiet, shadowed room, he looked out at the city lights and listened to Robert's long, even breathing from where he was laid out like a slain giant on the bed beside him. His legs were pale, half-tangled in the sheets. Desmond must have been paler than he'd begun, too. It had been a long time since he'd been under the sun.

Once when Robert had seen the longing way Desmond looked out at the sky he'd promised, _You'll see the world when you're one of us._

By the square of light that fell across him, Desmond looked at the arch of his throat and Ezio thought of the knives in the kitchen drawer, but wrong was not the same as evil. He had come to an understanding of Clay's message. Clay had always been the smarter one, the one who got there first. If he didn't leave now, he never would. 

Somewhere, there was a Desmond who laid back down and fitted himself to Robert's back as he allowed his eyes to close. 

It wasn't this one. 

The floor was very cold under his feet. He dressed quickly and knelt to paw through Robert's clothes. The key wasn't there. No, it hadn't been since he'd begun to begun to stay the nights. His fingers closed on something else and shoved it in his pocket. His stood with a moment's hesitation. He ripped the flyleaf from a book. A few moments later he knelt again to tuck the folded sheet into the jacket. 

Desmond stood looking at the keypad by the door. He let his eyes unfocus and half-close, as if they belonged to someone else . On the fourth try the door slid open.

The hall was brightly lit, white and clean. There were dozens of doors with keypads beside them. It was possible that Clay was behind one, and certain that Templars were behind the rest. 

_I'll come back for you_ , Desmond promised silently.

Right, twenty-four steps. Left, sixteen. Left, seven. There was the elevator he had ridden on a dozen times and never seen. It slipped down silently, a box with Desmond inside, alone. 

The lobby doors were glass and showed the open night, a lawn with a streetlight above. There was a single guard at the desk. Desmond's sneakers hit the floor in a soft, rapid patter. The guard looked up in surprise and drew the breath to shout. Desmond's arm locked around his throat until his body was limp and his pulse was a faint thud. He let the man crumple on the ground and stole the keycard from his pockets. He did not stop long enough to examine the monitor and see that the others had been sent to the twentieth floor on what would turn out to be a false alarm, or that the feed from the security cameras had an almost imperceptible jump at the end of each loop. He was also unaware that two days later, when he dared to visit the old emergency rendezvous point beneath the overpass, Rebecca and Shaun would be waiting, but it would be Clay who would greet him with, "What took you so long?" 

The card slid through the reader by the door with a sighing sound, a beep, and a green light the color of joy. Cool night air touched his face with the smell of grass, and he was running. 

 

 

News of the escape came to Robert de Sable at six thirteen in the morning, when his earpiece buzzed on the bedside table. The place beside him was empty. Response was immediate, the alarms raised and teams prepared. He was, first and last, a professional. 

There was a moment when the streams of orders stopped, and his fingertips found a shape in his jacket pocket. In an area no cameras faced, he drew out a piece of torn paper, and only then realized what else was missing. 

_I'll keep your pin safe. Find me when you don't need it anymore._

_There's a place for you._

He refolded the paper carefully. He placed it in his pocket. Nothing showed on his face. 

Robert canceled the team. His command was not questioned. 

When he set out to search, he went alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this whole thing! It's experimental in a lot of ways, so please let me know what you think. I'm pretty thickskinned.


End file.
